bdambrosio tavily
Search the web and get back what the pages actually say. Each result carries a title, its URL, a verbatim snippet, and — where extraction succeeded — the page's text in Markdown.
Choosing between this and search-web
Both take a question and neither needs a URL, so the split is about what you intend to do with the answer:
search-web— you want an answer. Orientation, breadth, unfamiliar territory, reconciling sources that disagree. You get one model's synthesis, which is fast to read and cheap to act on when the stakes are low.tavily— you want the sources. Anything you will assert as a specific: a phone number, a price, a version, a date, a credential, a quoted contract, an API parameter. The page's own words are the evidence, so what you say next rests on a document rather than on a summary of one.
Using both in one turn is normal, not a fallback: search-web for the
map, tavily for the handful of facts that go into the reply.
fetch-text remains the tool for a URL you already have, and for reading
a page in full — this returns the head of each page, not all of it.
What comes back
[1] <title>
<url>
snippet: <verbatim extract, relevant to the query>
page: <the page's text, truncated>
page: is best-effort. Some sites defeat extraction, and a result whose
page text is missing says so — you still have the snippet, but treat that
result as a lead rather than as a read source. When a page matters and
its text is missing or cut short, fetch-text the URL.
Cost
Every call is a Tavily advanced search: 2 credits. Extraction on
basic is materially less reliable — measured over three live queries,
4 of 9 results came back with no page text on basic and 9 of 9 had it
on advanced — and a result without page text defeats the point of
reaching for this tool.
Required environment
TAVILY_API_KEY
Examples
{"thought": "the user will call this office, so the number has to come off their own page", "tool": "tavily", "query": "Acorn Family Dental Care Berkeley phone number and address"}
{"thought": "quoting the API's own docs on this parameter, not a summary of them", "tool": "tavily", "query": "Tavily search API include_raw_content parameter accepted values", "max_results": 3}